Thomas H. Davenport

KnowledgeWorkerLike Robin, you and I—and most of our friends and colleagues—are knowledge workers. We all think for a living. Like Robin, many of us manage other knowledge workers.We’re all doing our work the best we can—or are we? Can we, like Robin, figure out a way to get better results from knowledge workers? Most of us have never even analyzed our own performance,or had much help from our employers in making us more productive and effective. We want to become more efficient at doing our jobs—and to help others do so as well—but we just don’t know how. We know more about our own work than just about anyone else, so it’s hard for a manager to improve our performance—and in any case we don’t like to be told what to do. We’ve never thought about the fact that we are knowledge workers, or about the implications of that fact for how we carry out and improve our daily activities. What difference does it make that we are knowledge workers? It’s certainly not a new thing. This category of work has existed for centuries—think about medieval monks, or the first professors at universities—so why write about them now? Well, as I’ll argue a little later in this chapter, if nothing else they’re important because they are a large category of workers—probably larger than ever before as a percentage of the workforce in sophisticated economies.

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